On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted downwards by around 5% - http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-ed...
The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long way to go, though, whichever you use!
Whups.
One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event; the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the likely cause of this.
Perhaps the damage has already been done on En? I would've suggested that maybe the WMF retention initiatives might have not failed entirely, except I don't remember any of them being finished in 2010, much less being able to affect the overall wiki so much.